Well, we were thinking of going to the beach today.  After all the digging up salmon berry bushes in the yard, and putting a few extra touches on the temporary garden shelter in the back.

But it’s one of those StormFest days — brilliant clear sunshine, the Strait of Juan de Fuca running before Vancouver Island is dark blue-black, chopped with whitecaps where the wind’s been axing the surface.  It’s the East Wind — and when they say that up here, they mean a wind nobody wants to face.

We’ve seen a lot of neighbors strolling down to the beach with their dogs and the wind at their back.  But on the way back, everybody’s hunched, eyes squinched, even the dogs.  The East Wind is getting them straight in the face.

We’ve done this a lot of times before, but after all the stress lately, we’re working in our cozy double-insulated double-wide with the new roof and the wood stove.  On a sunny winter’s day, we often don’t fire up until evening, because the place acts like a solar house.

When we’ve straightened things out here a bit, we’ll be ready for the winter scallop harvest.  We’ll be prepared to hit a bracing wind and ice up the fingers cleaning shellfish for two-inch-wide hunks of pulsing sweet pink meat.

But there’s nothing to eat out there today that’s worth the cold, and nothing to see today but the view — and we’ve got that from the window.

Hot fresh garden potatoes on the woodstove tonight!

You heavy-metal artists — the ones who weld together industrial parts — better think about getting up here before some other welder buys all the metal bits up here and then has a huge show in Berlin you can’t compete with.

The sawmills up here are full of tons of industrial scrap metal, giant old saws, gears — whatever you’re looking for, you can get it here.  A lot of the owners will be happier than heck to be able to sell it as art supplies rather than wholeselling it cheap for its worth in metal weight.

And yes, I’ve already warned them about giving this stuff away to you for nothing.  There’s stuff from the 1950’s up here — tons of it (literally).  There’s stuff from the 19th century up here!

Come up and invest in heavy metal.

Bring lots and lots of cash.

Recently the Forks Forum reported a contest about which town was warmer:  Sequim or Forks.

Forks was all excited about being warmer.

Well, d’uh.  Both of ‘em have got about as many trees as Los Angeles, and Sequim has the sea breeze.

And exactly why would any town hope it’s hotter than someplace else, in these days of global warming?  Trying to chase away possible home buyers?  Or just attract old people, who are too old to care about skin cancer or water shortages any more?

Clallam Bay is kind of stuck in the middle.

Neah Bay — the Makah nation — has been making some real interesting moves, lately.  I’ve heard the Sheriff complain that their police aren’t cooperating as closely with the Clallam County police.  They’re thinning their forests instead of clear-cutting.  They’re looking at Austin-style rainwater collection.  They’re working to generate electricity from wave action.  They’re teaching their kids to respect the culture, speak the Makah language, and eat the original native foods.  The parents and teachers are quietly asking for a greater role for native values, based on native stories, in the school curriculum.

I dunno about you, but to me that looks like the Makah are getting ready for the day the white folks screw everything up.  They’ll be set.

Now you can ask yourself — which way do we want to go?  Do we want to get hot and possibly Wal-marted like Forks (and you know how that usually ends, once the big W has bribed a community with a few paltry jobs and shipped out all the local money) — or do we want to develop tourism based on beauty and health for the future, that is,  the next generation and beyond? 

Clallam Bay and Neah Bay have always been close. Everybody’s related.  They all go to each other’s ceremonies and parties and funerals and celebrations.

Think about it.  Which way is better — up the coast to a windswept healthy future based on a surviveable past — or inland to concrete and heat?

It’s amazing to watch somebody showing this kind of loyalty to their animals.  There’s loyalty and there’s loyalty.

Most dogs up here, no matter how big, are cool.  Well-socialized, easy folk, who understand that they are NOT alphas around humans.   I got lots of friends among the local doghood.

But — one dog up here is an exception: so far, it’s annoyed or infringed on four households:

1.  Annoyed neighbor’s pets to the point that the owner got the neighbor’s dogs locked up as dangerous.  That’s one house.

2.  Killed another neighbor’s cat in our yard, behind our house.  That’s two more households.

3.  Is still being walked where it’s annoying some more neighbor’s dogs.  That’s at least one more household.

4.  Potential for more household hell:  It’s walked in front of two households with cats.  Now it’s killed one cat, it’s on the lookout for more — you can see that head up, alert, hoping for more prey.

5.  Wholesale action:  Whenever the dog got out, away from its owners, it trailed people down the street, barking and threatening.  Thank god the cat-killing got it locked up as dangerous.  Of course, the owners are still walking this thing around the neighborhood. 

The owners, however, have shown absolute loyalty to the dog.  So far they’ve:

1.  Lied about an open gate, when it was a broken fence the dog went through.  I helped ‘em drag a stove in front of the broken hole.  It’s in the police report.

2.  Walked their baby in the rain or wind, on their backs, so the dog gets excercise.  The kid isn’t even being looked at, so long as the dog gets all the attention.

3.  Lied about the necessity of taking the dog around another part of the neighborhood away from a predation area, with the excuse that the neighbor’s dogs were running out and barking at the dog and the baby.  The way this dog acts, I would HOPE the neighbor’s dogs are protecting their yard from it!

The dog is the absolute master in that house.  And people say I spoil my cats!  Then again, my cats are never going to have the capability to break other small animals’ backs, or rip off an adult human’s calf or kid’s face.  This is the difference between cats and dogs.  I grew up with a kid who got scalped by the family dog.  A local librarian’s dad had to shoot the family dog when the kids came home one day and the dog tore out after them.

Love dogs — but don’t have any delusions or illusions about them as full-fledged big predators.

This just keeps getting better and better.

(I’m often out in the yard with a shovel, digging up plants.  This dog gets off its leash someday and heads for our yard, even just to bark at me, and the problem will be taken care, on the spot.  I’ll probably have a hole all ready.  A nice fertilized place next summer to plant tomatoes!

Then people can take a bite and say, “MMMM!  GOOD dog!” )

I haven’t got anything against the local clear-cuts. 

I figure that, once the loggers have worked their way out of the area, they’ll have to leave and won’t be able to work here for 30 years.  In the meantime, we can get the forests onto the same careful choosing method the Makah are using and use them to support a much more widespread tourism industry. 

There won’t be any kids growing up to be loggers or truck-drivers in the meantime, because there will be nothing to cut or haul.

The Makah will beat us out on tourism because they are logging by thinning, but even white people can learn and turn their act around.

Not having a grocery store is a good thing.  We will be forced to buy local eggs and honey and milk.  We’ll make soy sauce from nettles (better than the bought stuff!).   We can can or buy canned goods from all the local housewives, who can stuff you’d be proud to buy in a European farmer’s market.   Get some of those agro-farms in contact with traveling butchers.  We can make our own cheese.

You can do that now.  Hit the Janda place in Beaver — 360 327 3824 — buy a gallon of Julie’s really fresh goat milk.  Enjoy some of it until it begins to sour.  Let it sour and separate.  Strain through cheesecloth and press a bit.  Stir up with salt, pepper and some herbs.

Fruity, rich, savory — a little bit stirred into hot noodles with a touch of olive oil is a gourmet treat.   Add a homegrown salad from the Forks Farmer’s Mart, some homemade bread and a bottle of Clallam Bay ale.

WHAT?  Nobody’s bought the old cannery to turn into a brewery yet?

Up here, it’s all right to brag that you’re “killing trees,” and making money off it, regardless of what it’s doing to your kids’ air, their water and their health.

BUT — it’s NOT all right to drag all the cars out of the rivers and out of people’s yards, and make money sellling ‘em to a crusher company.  Or set up an arts festival that will make sure everybody ultimately gets paid for a clean living they love.

Is it because money is considered dirty?  It’s all right to get it for something everybody knows is, at base, bad for everybody and makes them miserable – even described in those terms — but if it’s good for everybody you have to do it for free?

Okay, I got words for you religious folks out there in the faith-based initiative money hand-out.  I catch any of you using your position to shove your religion — ANY religion — monotheistic testicle, goddess-based, death-god, shaman — down the throats of your clients, you’re getting reported to the bean-counters who handed you the money in the first place.

This doesn’t mean you can’t talk religion. Or mythology. Or science — although the latter is usually awfully funny when you do it. You evidently don’t know that when you try to combine religion with science or the scientific method, you get magic. Or, if you BS it enough, alchemy.

While we’re at it, the Big Bang is not about Creation. Science doesn’t give a big whip about creation, or whether there was one or not. Science is about what can be observed and measured by anybody at any time, not about what you make up or see during delusions or claim you see. The Big Bang is about which way the galaxies are moving.  If you attempted to mix faith and theory together in the 16th century, your own churches would have burnt you for heresy.

According to the Mojave, a god created the world, and passed it on before dying to his son when his daughter witched him to death. The son finished the creation, then transformed into a stinking fish hawk and flew away.

Makes a hell of a lot more sense as a religion for responsible adults than a religion where a bad-tempered abusive daddy keeps his kids on their knees, begging for his love, whimpering for papa to keep them alive so they can serve him (with the Foley business lately, “kids on their knees” and “serve” isn’t something we want to bring up, is it?).

If there was a creation, it’s likely nobody’s running it. If there is, according to your religion, it must mean the gods are mean, arrogant, vicious, cowardly, bullying assholes. If creation is running itself — whether created or not - then it just means that Shit Happens. Nothing is unfair, or intentionally bad. It just happens. There’s no reason to feel that anybody Up There is out to get you.

The fully responsible adult universe really runs on the Golden Rule. What goes around comes around. If you are rotten to others, they’re liable to get rotten to you. Tease a leopard — or slog around in its hunting territory — and you’ll get what you deserve. As my mother always said to a scratched kid: “All right, what did you do to the cat?”

 Karma? You know that word? Act up, and get hurt by what you’ve hurt — not some imaginary god waiting for you in the afterlife.

Do you believe in an afterlife? What if I don’t? Does it matter? I believe that if you make heaven here, you get heaven here, and the same with hell. You believe the same thing about the afterlife — if you’re bad in this life, you’re going to your hell.  If you’re good, you get good.

BUT — even if I don’t believe, if I’m good in this life I get heaven in your afterlife.  It’s win-win for me.

How far do you think you’re going to get with YOUR righteous god if he finds out what you’ve done to his forests and his fish? Call it the wrath of god, call it disease, cancer, starvation or asthma — the universe will get you. I can go according to my beliefs and I’ll be all right in your afterlife. You, however — what makes you think your cosmic daddy’s going to be nice to you if you’re not nice? He’s a pretty bad piece of shit.

Here’s the basic rule:

Make nice.

Because it can get real ugly, real fast.

Re my article in Friday’s Peninsula Daily News: 

I did NOT write that Bob Nelsen “gave up” after attempting to fight the fire at his house.  That is editorial messing around by the PDN staff.   I did not send in an article with the word “Superintendent” twice, one right after the other, in one sentence.

I did NOT cut Margaret Owen’s head off in the arts article.  That is PDN staff layout sloppiness.  I think we’ve ALL seen the screwy PhotoShop’d images, including the hilarious one with the deer at Lake Crescent?

I also gave everybody credit for their prizes at the Arts Festival.  The only thing the PDN left in was references to John Brewer’s fish.

Now for the Forks Forum:

I did NOT pluralize the last names in the Cranberry article with apostrophes, in the possessive manner!  I know how to use plural and possessive and not mix them up!

So there.

The only way I can get by in this world is to absolutely believe there is no God. 

If there IS a god,  and he’s in charge, he is a mean, stupid, narrow-minded, cruel, cowardly, vicious bastard.  He’s a bully and an asshole.   He has a nasty sense of humor.

All I ask, after I die, is fifteen minutes fair fight with him in a small room.  I’d like to kick the bastard bloody if I had the chance.

Master of the Universe, my ass.

I wonder if St. Peter will take odds?

I love tag. 

I hate dodgeball.

When I was a kid, and we tagged, we tackled.  The tagee stayed TAGGED.

We played midnight hide-and-seek; the goal-keeper was a huge black Lab who raced us for the goal ladder, and knocked us down in the dark.

I invented one of the most fierce games on the planet — bicycle polo.  My mother wouldn’t let us play it with croquet mallets, but that didn’t prevent us from kicking each other black and blue.  We all had our own goals.  I got 17 points one summer.  ALL Summer.

We blindfolded each other and raced around on a cliff until my sister went over (she survived).

We threw each other into the surf in the middle of February.  30 miles north of Seattle.

We swung out on a rope swing over a nettle-filled gully.  Nobody fell in (although we all got cracked in the head by the huge hard knot when we’d jumped off and it swung back).

I think that proves we weren’t sissies.

BUT –

I despise organized sports.  They’re all about adult egos and keeping kids controlled. 

Dodgeball was invented by angry adults with a streak of bullying.

I’m an artist; you can imagine how coaches viewed me and my friends.  We refused to take part in pep rallies.  We sat quietly in the upper bleachers, where we had been forced to sit, reading, until we were allowed our own study hall.  Where we studied.

I recently shut up an abusive mouthy coach at a little league meet when he saw me re-setting a camera he knew could take videos.  I circled around his game once in a while to let him suspect that any more drill-sergeant act with the little girls, and he was going up on YouTube.com 

I hate bullies.  And I’ve got a video camera.