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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
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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. I got on it. It
was going too fast. I probably
could have stopped, picked
it up, and spent a little more
time figuring out how I was
going to properly negotiate
the hill before I crashed and
hurt myself. But I didn’t.
Lesson learned.
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