M.I.A.

(MIA--Missing in action? Morons in the Addiverse? My intestines ache? More incredible acne? Maybe I'm an anteater?)

The photo above is of Terrell Owens, from the Washington Post, a guy who is ALL OVER the TV right now for a supposed suicide attempt. Um, people! Terrell LOVES himself way too much to try and kill himself. Now let's move on....

Maybe that Jesus-St.-Joseph thing befuckled me more than I realized…I’m sure behind in the blogging department. (I have seen Jesus, by the way. He’s small.) (Wait—that doesn’t sound right. I have seen the STATUE of Jesus buried by Blue Eyes and Master Reiki and it was a small statue. I was expecting something more monumental. He did have nice coloring, though.)

(This photo has nothing to do with anything. )

Maybe it was that terror of being unemployed that had me ‘missing in action.’ It’s been a tough few weeks—gotta up those antidepressants and/or chocolate consumption to keep up with the stress. I’m not even enjoying “Dancing with the Stars.”

Jesus, save me!

The wife is distracted, too—why, I am not sure—she put her pancakes in the toaster this morning. Me? I forgot to come home at lunch to let the dogs out. In the 6.5 years we’ve had dogs, I’ve NEVER done anything like that. Oh sure, they were fine—they can hold their pee from 5:30 AM-3:30 pm—but we never ‘ask’ them to do that, as we don’t want their little bladders to BURST all over the living room furniture. (We’ll leave the peeing on the carpet for Freckles to do when we are home and she just came in from peeing. That’s different.)

So, during all my worrying & distraction, I’ve been planning for what I will do if my employment should “dry up.” I’ve decided that if that day does come, I will become a “Freegan.” In order to truly grasp the meaning and lifestyle of the Freegan, you’ll have to go to http://www.freegan.info/. Now, it’s a bit scary out there—cuz this is dumpster diving at it’s finest. You belly up to your favorite eating establishment’s dumpster, wait for them to toss out their daily tidbits, jump on in and start eating:

[photo from www.art.com; words directly copied from www.freegan.info] “….Perhaps the most notorious freegan strategy is what is commonly called "urban foraging" or "dumpster diving". This technique involves rummaging through the garbage of retailers, residences, offices, and other facilities for useful goods. Despite our society's sterotypes about garbage, the goods recovered by freegans are safe, useable, clean, and in perfect or near-perfect condition, a symptom of a throwaway culture that encourages us to constantly replace our older goods with newer ones, and where retailers plan high-volume product disposal as part of their economic model. Some urban foragers go at it alone, others dive in groups, but we always share the discoveries openly with one another and with anyone along the way who wants them. Groups like Food Not Bombs recover foods that would otherwise go to waste and use them to prepare meals to share in public places with anyone who wishes to partake.”
Of course there is much more to this, but for those on the bubble of being broke, it sounds very appetizing (pun intended).

In an effort to educate you about my pending Freeganism, I’ve ripped this right off the Freegan.info site: [and, I copy] “What is a Freegan? Freegans are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity, and greed. After years of trying to boycott products from egregious corporations responsible for human rights violations, environmental destruction, and animal abuse, many of us found that no matter what we bought we ended up supporting something deplorable. We came to realize that the problem isn't just a few bad corporations but the entire system itself. Freeganism is a total boycott of an economic system where the profit motive has eclipsed ethical considerations and where massively complex systems of productions ensure that all the products we buy will have detrimental impacts most of which we may never even consider. Thus, instead of avoiding the purchase of products from one bad company only to support another, we avoid buying anything to the greatest degree we are able.
The word freegan is derived from "free" and "vegan". Vegans are people who avoid products from animal sources or products tested on animals in an effort to avoid harming animals. Freegans take this a step further by recognizing that in a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the earth abound at all levels of production (from acquisition to raw materials to production to transportation ) and in just about every product we buy. Sweatshop labor, rainforest destruction, global warming, displacement of indigenous communities, air and water pollution, eradication of wildlife on farmland as "pests", the violent overthrow of popularly elected governments to maintain puppet dictators compliant to big business interests, open-pit strip mining, oil drilling in environmentally sensitive areas, union busting, child slavery, and payoffs to repressive regimes are just some of the many impacts of the seemingly innocuous consumer products we consume every day.”

I’m going to stick with the dumpster diving part of Freeganism, although I could choose the “choose not to work” motto of some freegans. The wife would throw ME in the dumpster if I made that choice.