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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (June 14, 2017)
10 Wednesday, June 14, 2017 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon The Bunkhouse Chronicle Craig Rullman Columnist Speed wobbles Once, while attending a summer program for young students at UC Santa Barbara, I attempted to skateboard down a long, sloping hill. I had no business doing that. I was not a skateboarder. Where I hailed from in the outback corner of northern California skateboarding was not a thing — because it is very difficult to skateboard on dirt roads. But I tried any- way. I stepped aboard and went merrily down the path until, and quite suddenly, the skateboard developed speed wobbles, became uncontrol- lable, and I was tossed uncer- emoniously – and I’m sure hilariously – into the grass. The skateboard went shooting off into the bushes like a dud missile while I lay impaled, and writhing, on a lawn sprinkler. Ever-after I have been mindful of speed wobbles. In Trout Fishing in America, Richard Brautigan observed, rather optimisti- cally, that no winter spent in an insane asylum could be counted as a total loss. There would be, he pointed out, “television, clean sheets on soft beds, hamburger gravy over mashed potatoes, a dance once a week with the lady kooks, clean clothes, a locked razor and lovely young stu- dent nurses.” Lately — by which I mean every single day — I admit to difficulty in warding off the notion that we have, collec- tively, checked ourselves into a nuthouse. There is, for example, the Russian question, which appears to be more and more of a political and journalistic fidget-spinner – a three-sided toy that keeps going nowhere even as it goes faster and faster and amazes the chil- dren. There is the continued hand-wringing over who uses what bathroom, spectacular millennial meltdowns on the quad, Nancy Pelosi, parents in Ohio and Florida putting their children in dog kennels, male rompers, manties, now mantyhose, even. There are the druids of climate science, endlessly declaring the apocalypse and flagellating themselves in parade. There is that army of attorneys and professors end- lessly bullwhipping the peas- ant class with their limitless expertise and remarkable lack of self-awareness. There is the enduring mystery of Jerry Brown, Nancy Pelosi, that weird Rasputin in the White House named Steve Bannon, environmental zealots who leave hundreds of tons of gar- bage and dead dogs behind their protests, eyebrow shav- ing and suicidal behavior over whether or not to install stop lights or roundabouts, great white sharks eating babies in Wal-Mart, fentanyl lollipops, and masked truckers driving their Peterbilts through the Moonlight Bunny Ranch. Probably none of this hyperbole is new to humanity, and I’m certainly not suggest- ing our times are somehow worse than they were in, say, Atlanta after Sherman was finished. But I would argue strongly that somehow the frictions of our time often feel manufactured out of the sheer boredom afforded by luxury. They get built like a coal fire in a steam engine, and contin- ually stoked by the 10-minute news cycle for purposes other than identifying and solv- ing actual problems. Even as I write that I can hear the teeth gnashing and garment rending. And the train just keeps hauling ass down the tracks, even as nobody knows — though they all claim they do — where it is actually headed. Also, none of it will help me grow more apples, a bet- ter crop of green beans, or encourage more flexion in my colt’s neck, which are things I spend far more time worrying about. In his marvelous book, Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari writes: “…despite the astonish- ing things that humans are capable of doing, we remain unsure of our goals and we seem to be as discontented as ever. We have advanced from canoes to galleys to steam- ships to space shuttles – but nobody knows where we’re going. We are more power- ful than ever before, but have very little idea what to do with all that power. Worse still, humans seem to be more irresponsible than ever. Self-made gods with only the laws of physics to keep us company, we are accountable to no one.” We have the speed wob- bles, but at least we know how to make glow-in-the- dark bunny rabbits. On the political end, I’ve mostly capitulated. On the national and state level I really don’t care who wins or loses because my candidate always loses — I voted for Jim Webb — and I have stopped trusting any of them. I simply don’t believe they are high-minded public servants out for the greater good. Any of them. I think they all have their heads buried rather deep in the trough and enjoy absolv- ing themselves from laws the rest of us have to live by. Rather, I prefer to focus on being a good citizen entirely within my own community. With abundant justification I now view the entire political class the same way I look at striped apes leaping around in a zoo. For the record, despite the high-and-right outrage of sev- eral readers of this column, I believe in climate change, and always have. I just don’t believe most of the people who compose the more zeal- ous cadre of the climate FINEFURNITURE church deaconry are actu- ally willing to give up their cars, their cell phones, their computers, their bicycles, or anything else that requires intensive mining, exploitation of fossil fuels, and ultimately, anything that will cause them actual sacrifice to solve it — and mostly I despise the piety. So, ultimately, for me, it’s about living just practically enough, lightly enough, and personally honest enough to stay out of Brautigan’s asy- lum, where so many of the hyperbole Jesuits seem to reside. Which brings me back to that skateboard. 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