It’s an excellent start to Saturn’s Day. Wifie’s early AM grumbles were minimal, I’ve had my Doppio Espresso (my local barista is a real whiz at pulling good, honest, Italian style espresso), I’ve had my Poor-she sports car out for a spin before the weekend hordes hit the highway (or the lines of long-haul-truckers segue into elephant-queue games in the right two freeway lanes) and even shared a pome with another Suckatomato bad poet (my friend Sev).

Not at all a bad start in this festering armpit of Central Valley Californica! (That also just happens to be the capital of the world’s 4th largest economy, no thanks to the managerial incompetence of its Teflon-slick guvernator, Mr. Photo-Op himself, Governor Gravel Noisome).

After our obligatory early AM 2 miles ‘walk’ (more like a late stage in the Alaskan Iditarod Race, by Husky standards), I loaded Balto’s understudy into my ’95 Hyundai mule and found my favorite table at the local coffee house unoccupied. As a strange Californica Civet Cervix manager I once worked for would put it, “Cool-e-oh!” [He once explained which treacly American TV series sitcom he got that expression from...was it “The Office?”...but I’ve since forgotten).

Parking Moby Duck (my Hyundai Elantra wagon) in front of the coffee oasis (the coffee house’s actual name is ‘VENUS’...more strangeness), I hitched the girl up to the potted Adder’s Tongue (similar to the one my mother kept by the front door of our home and loved so well...copyright FIRESIGN THEATRE, 1970) and joined a mercifully short line in front of the pastry display case, burdened with caloric confections.

My barista there must have some Eye-talian blood in her veins, since she does a mean pull on the espresso machine. I wish I could say their espresso machine was one of the fancy, antique American Eagle types every superior coffeehouse in Berkeley or San Francisco used to have, back in the beatnik era, but alas!...it’s just another high-tech, grossly overpriced commercial type that is common everywhere today (Sic evanescit gloria mundi).

And because I am a regular there, at my accustomed table outside on the terrace just about every morning, she gives me an extra pull at no charge (so it’s actually a ‘Doppio-plus’). I guarantee you, by the way, that if you go into just about any contemporary coffee house these days and ask for an ‘espresso doppio’, you’ll likely just get a blank stare or a puzzled expression.

In fact, since they can see me coming through the outside expanse of window, the barista begins to make my espresso, so that by the time I enter and order, it’s already steaming hot and waiting for me. Ah! Heaven!

As is my accustomed ritual, I also order a croissant for the girl and an interesting sort of cup-cakey thing called a Kouign Amann. This is a deliciously subtle pastry, originating in France’s Breton region, that until recently was entirely new to me. I normally am not much of a Francophile, being of Austrian-Irish ancestry, but aside from acknowledging that the French men (can be and often are) insufferable ânes de cheval, France does produce several things excellently: yummy baked goods and beautiful, classy and elegant wimminfolk.

The Kouign Amann (and its close cousine, the Far Breton, which has sort of flanish character) are not the usual ghastly sort of drippingly sweet thing that sugar-addicted ‘Mericanos, are so drawn to. They were, accordingly, a delightful surprise to find at the VENUS. Subtle, after all, is not a noteworthy American quality in this land of ‘Big Gulp’ and ‘Bigger is better!’ consumer excess.

Taking my seat outside, under the watchful eye of my furry-pawed snowshoer (who always gets her croissant), I sat there savoring the bitter perfection of my espresso as I took in the early AM surroundings. Not far from us sat a mother and her small tyke, next to which a wonderfully mixed-breed, furry black-and-white pup also sat, attention raptly focused on the edible goodies being enjoyed.

“Freddie” (for that was the pup’s name), aged 9, had German Shepherd, Australian Heeler and also some Border Collie in his family tree and had been with them from an early age. Observing them from some 10 feet away, I was touched by the obvious tenderness and affection accorded Freddie by his human. It was clear that unlike so many pups adopted these days, he was a solid member of the family and loved as such. I finally commented on this and gave Freddie a few gentle strokes under his chin. Such a sweet boy!

My own grrrrl, watching all this, was for her part totally uninterested, as her full attention...like that of most Huskies...was riveted like a green laser beam on the croissant I had sitting on top of my table. Very ‘husky-like’ behavior, of course, since like the wolves they descended from 10-20 thousands of years ago, they are obsessively keen on anything that smells like food.

Back at the table, after ‘meeting’ Freddie, I resumed my accustomed ruminations.

There’s a Chinese-American massage parlor and ‘beauty-salon’ next to the coffee house and as I sat there a middle-aged AsiAm women got out of her car and headed for the latter’s door. In her 40s but still extremely attractive, she was a remarkably well-preserved woman. Remarkably, Asian women tend to remain youthful looking for a long time, in my experience (when contrasted to their Western counterparts).

When she passed me, on a whim I said ‘Ni Hao’ and smiled, which was probably a very boorish Guai Loh thing to do. She utterly ignored me, of course. Too bad. Just being friendly, although perhaps a bit banal, even gauchely so. Sometimes I tend to be a bit too friendly (or perhaps inappropriately so) for my own good with total strangers. She probably though I was trying to hit on her...like most women do reflexively these days, whenever some strange (white) man tries to be amiable (with no other intent). No problem if you’re coffee-colored, of course. Sad.

All my life I have enjoyed observing people at the coffee houses I patronize. Those in Berkeley (or San Francisco’s North Beach) of the early 70s were a far cry from today’s urban (Suckatomato) coffee house. Back then, one of the main pleasures of sharing a coffee serving environment was observing and perhaps meeting interesting people and possibly having some casual conversation with otherwise total strangers.

Today’s coffee house patrons tend to be insular, socially isolated and fiercely broadcasting, via their body language, that they do not want to engage others in innocuous conversation. This is especially true for younger females in this god-forsaken feminist/LGBTQ+ berg that is Suckatomato.

Most often they assertively underscore this point by wearing ear-buds or small headphones and concentrating (so they wish to make apparent) on their cellphones or the laptop in front of them. I see a few who look like they are actually doing something ‘serious’ on their laptops but can’t help but wonder how anyone can possibly focus on a complex creative process (like writing, or reading) in public, surrounded by others who are or aren’t talking.

The exceptions to this are the occasional small family clusters, say a man & his wife with a kid or two, or a small group of female friends, whose ‘thick-as-thieves’ conspicuity reinforces the ‘do not approach under any circumstances’ message being silently broadcast around the room. I am sure that, given that Suckatomato is the ‘new’ gay-capital of our state with a disproportionate number of gay couples in its demographic makeup, many of these couples are gay or lesbian. Another huge sea-change from the early 70s.

Older people make up the few exceptions to this behavioral nuance, since older people tend to feel at least to some degree increasingly isolated by the modern pop-cultural resonances of our younger generations, and will occasionally make a friendly comment as they pass by, heading for the counter area. A symbolic act of reaching out by another lonely soul, tossed in the storm of social change.

When you have a dog along with you...especially a drop-dead gorgeous pup like my girl...such comments are fairly de rigueur, although younger women are still too wary of single men of any age to offer up any opening at all, even if only to compliment a good doggie. This irrational, social ‘fear’ of men, I feel, is a palpable and lamentable result of the strongly feminist sentiment that has swept this country since the COVID-19 crisis. Today, given the still powerful DEI/Woke/ideological stance maintained by so many individuals and institutions, men (particularly us whiteys) are still considered ‘evil and predatory’ by too many younger women.

By the standards of those of us raised in earlier times (when male chauvinism and rampant sexism actually were in full-season), this is a sad fact of modern life that must be accommodated like bitter medicine that we have been told is good for us.

Of course, once one is nearer 80 than 70, many of us ‘evil white men’ are just languishing from basic human contact and lack of even rudimentary interaction, and would probably be willing to PAY for a friendly, no-strings-attached bit of platonic conversation with another person...even if our vaunted masculine ego forbids us from admitting this.

Be all this as it may, I find I still derive a huge amount of gratification just being in the proximity of others and it stems from my lifelong fascination with human behavioral patterns and interactions, as an amateur, armchair sociologist. Call it the herd effect, if you will, but we Humming Beans are an inherently gregarious species...even the staunchest introverts among us.

In my opinion, when a substantial amount of narcissism is mixed together with an affected norm of social avoidance (created as above, with specific reference to younger people), you get a horrifically uncertain mix of social dynamics that literally impose yawning virtual chasms between individuals. And in most cases, needlessly, capriciously or even devastatingly so.

Sitting there at the Venus (I would have been sorely tempted to name it Venus’s Mons, chuckle-chuckle, being the incorrigible iconoclast I am) this AM, regarding the other dog person’s interactions with her ‘Freddie’ (and reflecting on how much my girl means to me and my whole life), I found myself pondering a strange “Send Us Your Money” plea that wifie had received by snail-mail, just the other day.

It was from a 501(c)(3) non-profit named ‘THE WOUNDED PAW PROJECT.’ As a confirmed dog person myself, it attracted my immediate attention, but let me first fling a bit of context at you, here.

Wifie is one of those innocent people who, in what I am sure to her is a practical means of reducing her annual taxable gross income so that she doesn’t end up owing the state or Fed at tax time, donates to a wide range of charities. Accordingly, she sends off money to just about any charitable plea that lands on her desk, naively unaware that an initial charitable donation is just the tip of a looming, onerous iceberg that provokes an endless avalanche of wheedling pleas for more money. Thus, she ends up on dozens upon dozens of charitable cause lists for organisations like ‘Orphaned Sioux Reservation children’, ‘Kashmiri War Veterans’, ‘Jews for Jesus Polish Babushka Relief’, hundreds of animal welfare causes, ‘The United Nations Health Organisation Program to Eliminate Bacterial Vaginitis’ (bad stuff, that!), scammers on ‘Go Fund Me’ who want you to help them pay for overhauling their Porsche’s engine, etc., etc., et bloody cetera.

Such fusillades, of course and completely aside from driving innocent donors absolutely bonkers with their junque-mail badgering, also share their mailing lists with similarly ‘Hoovering’ commercial advertisers. I would imagine that such lists shared with associate organisations are typically prefaced by a paragraph that starts out: “HEY! We caught another naïve live one! Here’s their personal contact information!”

End result is that wifie ends up with a stack of junque mail each day that makes me crazy just watching it pile up! There’s no Super-Heavy-Duty paper shredder in the world capable of keeping up with destroying all that crap!

OK, so much for the contextual back-story, here. Yesterday, the WOUNDED PAW PROJECT envelope caught my eye, so I picked it up, opened it and read the contents. What I found was something that absolutely shocks cynical little old me.

In this letter, I was introduced to a charitable activist group that is dedicated to the elimination of ritual dog sacrifice cultists (generally identified as being believers in a bizarre sect known as SANTERIA, an Afro-Cuban cult that is described as a ‘religion’ in material describing it, such as on WIKIPEDIA). According to Ernesto P. Hernandez, III (a retired USAF serviceman, and claimed Purple Heart veteran), the founder of the group, this bizarre and savagely ignorant ‘religion’ is actively practiced by over 5 million people in the Americas (note: plural).

In so many words, it consists of “believers” torturing dogs in the most painful and brutal manner possible, their faith being that the more the dogs suffer, the greater the chances that hidden animal spirits that roam the world will bless and strengthen the practitioners.

The images taken of and at some of these sacrifices are truly shocking and I have absolutely no treason to disbelieve them. Even describing such unspeakably horrific acts is distressing, or ought to be to anyone who deeply cares for our human companion animals (specifically dogs, but also cats), our ‘fur kids.’

I rarely, if ever donate or contribute to mailed-in pleas for money from any organization and also carefully guard my actual ‘living address’, using mail-drop for that snail-mail purpose, but I can assure you, as soon as I can figure out how to anonymously donate to The Wounded Paw Project, I shall do so posthaste.

Which brings me to the point I wish to make here about the absolute futility of all human life on this (human) parasite-infested planet we exist upon: Something I call IQGENICS.

IQGENICS is a bit like EUGENICS, except that instead of being a method of selectively culling the Human herd on the basis of race and/or ethnicity identity, it aims to use intelligence as a pass/fail screening filter.

Clearly, that’s an overly-simplified explanation, since “IQ” is not and never shall be a simple, clear-cut concept. Given the deprivation and destruction that humanity wreaks on our natural world (a process that threatens to continue, expanding exponentially over the next several hundred years), it’s pretty clear to me that some means of selectively controlling the world’s burgeoning population is becoming urgently needed.

Eugenics originated in turn-of-the-20th century America and it was intended to provide ‘scientific’ justification for virulent white racist practices. 40 or so years later, under the re-interpretational prompting of Hitler’s German National Socialists, eugenics was revived as a pseudo-scientific weapon for use against the Jews. It was in both cases obviously flawed and destined to eventually fall out of favor among society’s intelligentsia. Given that skin color, ethnicity and place of origin constitute a tragically flawed criteria for determining who may flourish and procreate and who may not, it therefore seems that using intelligence as a determinant for culling the human herd would be a far better resolution to explore.

Think about it in these terms, if it helps. Two ‘average’ people with ‘average intelligence’ meet, succumb to the usual hormonal urges and copulate...producing offspring. If they are conventionally unremarkable in terms of their origins, both intellectually and familially, the chances are (based on simple Mendelian genetic principles & theory) that their children will be just as prone to abse addicting substances, gorge themselves on commercial junk food, get grossly overweight, casually shoot high-school peers on impulse, and waste their lives succumbing to commercial, materialist exploitation...just like mom & dad did.

Should “mom & dad” be, on the other hand, possess higher-than-average intellectual and social intelligence, should mom & dad play piano, be very good looking, calculate rocket trajectories at CalTECH for a living, write best-selling books, enjoy poetry, “good” music, and appreciate higher cultural aspects of their society, the chances are equally propitious that when they grapple erotically with each other in the usual, sweaty, lustful coital context, their offspring will have inherited some or most of their superior genetic material and the world (theoretically, at least) will be a much better place. Ergo est...

It’s pretty clear to me that primitive people who, in our modern times, insist on slaughtering animals to placate their fanciful gods, should be prohibited from engaging in their barbarically ignorant rituals with impunity. If that means cauterising this grossly deficit expression of aberrant human behavior by more direct means, the world would be miles ahead for it.

It’s also pretty obvious that these defective idiots in reference do NOT have any of the qualities desirable to justify their further execrable existence, at least by my secular old-school standards.

Since spending bazillions of USAID dollars upgrading their miserable economic and existential life circumstances (just check the track record of that miserably corrupt agency, to see how much of its money ACTUALLY went towards basic education, fundamental economic welfare and related requisites, if you doubt the veracity of this status quo) clearly doesn’t work (think Kubrick’s character Alex... a ‘Droog’ in the epic film version of Burgess Meredith’s CLOCKWORK ORANGE), the next best solution as I see it would be to simply napalm the areas where these miserable creatures live...after first sending them a courtesy notice that their pathetic lives are about to end if they persist in torturing dogs in the name of their gods. Cauterisation has been a medically beneficial practice since the earliest days of Hippocrates...use of napalm for similar purposes would merely be applying the same principle on a larger, situationally appropriate scale, it seems to me.

After all, and in a most practical consideration possible, our dogs do so much for us, enhancing our miserable lives with their dedication and unqualified affection (compared to those savages who adulate dog-torture the way Roman Catholics regard wine & wafer simulations of the body & blood of the Christian Christ), that it’s really a ‘nolo contrendere’ judgement.

Naturally, all the Karens in the audience (and all those who swallow the DIE/Woke/racial identity ideological horse exhaust reflexively (like Linda Lovelace in ‘Deep Throat’ or Monica Lewinsky in Clinton’s Oval Orifice) and without any mental reflective rumination whatsoever) would object to a proposed solution to what should be a major concern for all of humanity. Think about it. Would you welcome dog-torturing savages to be the folks next door in your domestic version of Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood? Would you really?

Several days ago, while wasting a few minutes during the day, I caught the programming on a commercial (read: free) television station that identifies itself as ‘STORYTV.COM.’ Each day of the week this “interesting” channel features a different theme that is chopped into four program parts, with the in-between intervals dedicated to some of the most awful commercials you could ever hope to be involuntarily exposed to (more thoughts of Stanley Kubrick’s famed ‘CLOCKWORK ORANGE’ conditioning occur). Hewing to ages-old commercial television convention to startle, upset, emotionally arouse and create uncertainty and anxiety among viewers, this particular program concerned itself with a blatantly over-simplified Malthusian Alarums & Excursions take on our planet’s burgeoning population problems. Principally focused on unchecked population growth, consumption of non-replaceable resources, rampant growth of energy needs, and increasing pressure in economic aspects of national life, it certainly was calculated to scare...in the simplest, most direct manner possible...the socks off even the sort of brick-dense clods that watch this stuff out of boredom, each day.

On this particular day, after several segments of all this ‘scarifying’ stuff, the program got around to what we call the ‘preppers’, those self-described survivalists who work like frantic little squirrels to stock up their shelves in preparation for the feared ‘end of the world/ scenario they have been led to believe is looming ahead of us.

Of course, that feared ‘end of the world’ isn’t all hype and anxiety-laden fantasy, even without a religious spin, since at present rates of human energy consumption, burgeoning population growth and resource-depletion, the world as we presently know it will INDEED cease to exist in the not-far-off-future. But given that Humans are devilishly clever little parasites, we’ll likely figure out some way to dodge that evolutional Great Big Bullet when it is finally fired at us by Ma Nature. The fact that this point is therefore not likely to occur for several hundred more years or so, simply makes it easier to rationalize it all away as so much needless paranoia...for a few more decades, at least.

Meanwhile, the human squirrels I mentioned above are all madly devoting their time and attention to assuring their personal survival when this fateful moment occurs. After all, didn’t their evangelical pastor preach (envisioning phantom horse hoof-beats) about just such a predestined ‘Day of Reckoning’ last week?

I always get a huge chuckle when I read about all those ‘preppers’, since of what good is physical survival when the entire supporting infrastructure of human existence has just been erased by thermonuclear fireworks? I think they must regard survival after such a monumental apocalypse as some sort of Disneyesque adventure...great fun for the whole family! This is merely another hidden danger of living the sort of vicarious, bored, fantasy existence that modern commercial American culture imposes on us, I fear, through its incessant media and advertising.

Too, at such moments and accompanying my mirth, is a recollection of the scene in that wonderful Pythonesque film called ‘Time Bandits’, when the trolls’ fishing trawler suddenly starts to rise out of the water to reveal that a mythical giant has it on his head like a hat as he walks onto shore...where he thuds across the beach to a bluff that has a tiny cottage on it, in which another troll is arguing with his wife about something. The giant steps on the cottage with one of his huge sandals, thereby crushing it completely flat. That brilliant allegorical statement about our comparatively trivial concerns wiped out in a heartbeat by pure fate & chance is memorable, but even more so against the enormity of the uncertainties in our known and unknown Cosmos, in which our daily human worries and anxieties count about as much as a microscopic mouse fart in the full fury of NOAA’s Typhoon of the Century.

AH! HUMAN LIFE! YA GOTTA LOVE IT (AND LIVE IT, SADLY)

But returning to the subject of the absurdities of sentient life that has evolved here on our (otherwise) lovely planet, all one has to do is spend a few minutes watching the sort of pure three-brain-cell moronic crap being spoon-fed by commercial advertisers to their audience of barely-able-to-think Humming Beans, to fully appreciate just what a tragi-comedy it all is...were it not for the fact the absolute desecration of our home planet has been reduced to a forgettable mental tangent, lost as it is in a plethora of banal trivialities.

In my opinion, life is difficult enough trying to orchestrate and organize the affairs of nearly 8 billion neurotic, bipedal human primates without permitting what is perhaps one of the worst religiously justified acts of violence and brutality conceivable (“occult animal sacrificial rituals”) to continue to exist, unchecked.

The founder of the Wounded Paw Project, by the way, states that his main goal is to reach the President (Trump) and instigate a bicameral legislative act to ban and outlaw such outrages as intentional canine sacrifice.

Marx famously described all religion as “... the opium of the people. It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.” He was, of course, speaking not as a man of piety but as a secular humanist, and it is a sentiment I deeply share. Whenever sheer savagery masquerades as a religious rite, it is especially censurable, and one step towards possibly eliminating unfathomably abysmal ignorance of that extreme sort would be to take a serious look at something like IQGENICs (through the application of enlightened genetic screening for intellectual and social intelligence).

Naturally, given the pitiful length of a human life (especially our own Mayfly-like existence and the colossal, unknown immensity of our surrounding Cosmos), it’s all too easy to simply turn a deaf ear to this further example of the continuing farce that we call life and adopt a more pragmatic Buddhist or Stoic approach to such things.

I expect that that’s exactly how thoughts such as the above will appear to most people living in a nation like ours that has substituted sheer materialistic, consumptive gluttony for a rigid system of ethics and secular morality, but it’s a great tragedy, nonetheless.

And that’s how my day started today. How did yours go, bunkies...?