The Beauty of the Conservative Fox

If asked to punish the opposition to my political dreams, the very soul that wishes to crush me and leave me for dead inside a trash compactor outside of Louisville, there are truly only two considerable options that rush blindly through my mind.  The first, of course, is to hate them with every fiber of my being and to spend the rest of my life committing a whole overflowing cornucopia of sins in order to extinguish their flame.  Or I could date them – considering the female gender specifically – and put them through all of the lukewarm Applebee’s dinners they can swallow before sucking them dry through the torment of marriage.

Ah, sweet sadistic fantasies – will you ever leave my mind?

God forbid they ever crawl from my ears like tarantulas of virtue.  A tarantula of virtue that keeps reminding me (in the sacred language of the arachnids, very tricky – very tricky!) that I find the conservative breed the most alluring.  And after years of dating soppy liberals with sloughs of social problems and an overwhelming lack of foresight, I am ready to admit that the liberal end of the political spectrum is the weakest of possible options.  Feminists eating feminists and spike-haired teetotalers are damn attractive – damn attractive! – but lack the little twist that I so much enjoy.  It’s amazing how conventional and expected the life of a drug addict is.  Waking up and going to “work”, at different times of course, but always maintaining a similar routine that seems mundane for the subject at hand.

If you’re going to lead a life of hard drugs, abuse, or simple excess… you better stand out every once in a while.  You’ll be forgotten – (And the corpse will rot without notice.)

And the beauty of the conservative female is as follows: Passionate structure.  It no longer matters that your views are incorrect, (or misguided, or ignorant, or perhaps just obsolete,) but instead that you believe in something at all.  You believe that the lives of coulda-beens and shoulda-beens are more important than our society of ares – maybe you’re right!  Perhaps my eyes have been blinded by the stinging sweat of nervous do-gooders.  And damn! I’ve invested so much!  But that’s why I have my soft spot for you, righty foxes, and even your mothers, as well.

Two champagne glasses filled with gorgeous certainty and unrivaled confidence create the legs of the ideal conservative woman.  Perfectly tanned – spoiled even – by a sun that has shone just for them.  And in turn, they shine for me.  For you.  For everyone, some would insist.  It was Winston Churchill who once said, “The perfect set of legs could make me a Nazi in seconds.”  Don’t look that up, it’s speculative at best, but a valid point all the same.  (Churchill thought it, I’m sure, and isn’t that good enough?)  And I say in complete seriousness, with a hastily mixed concoction of shame and pleasure smeared across my face, that a sincere Republican woman is more attractive than her counterpart.

But Christ! Have I gone soft?  Have I lost all sense of convictions?  Have I been snagged by the evil glue that seeped from the pores of Richard Nixon?  The same disgusting paste that some life-long Republicans can’t seem to pry themselves away from?  Have I lost my mind to the extent that I would chance my entire life in the hands of a right-wing nutjob in high heels?

Yes – and it’s a beautiful downfall that tastes sweeter with each passing day.

And I’d fill an entire newspaper with personal ads suggesting the very same treacherous thought that I’ve been hinting at for so long: The young Republican woman, (much like the ideal young Republican male,) has class.  A shine.  A dare I say blissful quality that has no competition, and unsurpassed brilliance in moments of defense.  When they argue, they make me smile.  And when they win, in those rare and bittersweet moments, I get butterflies as though I were performing “Stairway to Heaven” on an ivory kazoo at Wembley Stadium.  A certain wonderfully nervous moment I can’t suppress with distain for neo-con rhetoric.  Five spoonfuls of liberal sugar get all lumped up in my throat.  It’s a tremendous, awful experience I always treasure behind closed doors.

Doors I have used to hide shrines of Republican idols, both named Mike.  Wallace and Ditka, respectively, make me grit my teeth with anxious frustration.  And doors that hide file cabinets of complaints about immigration, and concessions to faith-based ideologies, and certain sympathies for Nixon.  He thought he was right!  Go figure.  And I’ve come to accept such pitiful excuses from lizards of California politics. 

And the hope – the subtle dream – is that behind a closed door lies a beautiful right-wing fanatic who can agree to disagree.  Or at least is willing to fight dirty – the only way to fight – with chairs, or lamps, or the overturned urn of my Libertarian father smashed across both our skulls, leaving us in a swirling pile of blood and filth and rhetoric.  And love.  Perhaps not the same dream that Dr. King shared with the masses, but a vision of perfection nonetheless.

And a wonderful realization of insanity.

The Hidden Torso of Kingston

For over three years, I worked in what would come to be known enthusiastically in the Clinton 90s as the “service industry.”  It’s what America has become: a nation that is completely based in service oriented careers, from fast food to telemarketing, as opposed to the years we spent as a leading industrialized nation.  Name me the big wig industrial tycoons of the 21st Century – the modern day equivalents to Ford, Carnegie, or Rockefellar – and the answers are far less clear.  Our modern captains of financial gain are computer wizards – Gates and Jobs – and reliability from the blue-collar backbone of America no longer means what it used to. 

This has nothing to do with any of that mumbo jumbo.

This summer I picked up a job with the Des Moines County Roads Department, and before I get into the spellbinding story I have saved for the most sincere readers, allow me to fill you in on my usual job duties: I wake up at 6 in the morning, roll into the shop around 7, and until a noon lunch, my partner and I usually drive around doing 15 minute odd jobs at our leisure.  You know – for the sake of the county.  Your tax dollars keep our gas tank filled in order to promote what the boss calls “windshield time.”  Maybe we mow a lawn or two, weed-eat a bridge area, or paint some railroad crosses.  Maybe we don’t.  Maybe our mission is to “scout” the county for problems – a wonderful code that simply means “we’ve run out of things for you to do at the moment, so feel free to drive around.”  And we do. 

But occasionally, as part of our lackey duties, we have to participate in roadkill pickup.  With the rest of the crew working on their designated projects, (road fills, culvert work, or sign detail,) my partner John and I are the designated roadkill bitches, expected to drop whatever we are doing to retrieve nature’s corpses.  Understandably, our only calls come for deer.  John is a farm boy and has no squeamish tendencies when it comes to dead animals.  I am a city slicker, but also a part-time nut-job, so picking up decapitated deer doesn’t send me into a frenzy either.  I shared a quick story with John late last afternoon about my elementary days at the bus stop picking up dead possums and swinging them at my riding companions.  I miss the good old days.

Anyway, we had a call yesterday afternoon about a deer on Highway 99 – “real fresh” our boss assured us, promising that the smell would be only minimally offensive.  Without a second thought, John and I headed down 99 toward Kingston without shovels or tarps or anything but our God given strength and beautiful hands.  John claims to be a model.  I claim he’s full of shit.  Either way, within 20 minutes we stumbled across the body of our interest. 

Both of the antlers had been knocked from its crown, and one of its eyeballs had rolled down the white line of the steamy highway.  The neck had been unquestionably broken, twisted nearly all the way around.  The back legs had been run over repeatedly it seemed, both on the verge of falling off, but somehow managing to keep in a whole trail of bowels and internal organs that were beginning to spew from the backside.  And in the mess of it all, there were lots of random pieces of meat scattered across the road, none of which I could place as distinct body parts, but all surrounded by swarms of horse flies.  We put on our gloves and gave it a go.  The plan was to pick her up by the legs and swing her into the back of our truck.  From there, we would drop by Strawberry Point and leave her in a backwoods ditch.  This was all easier said than done. 

It should be noted that we have done this before, and although we are not trained professionals, we weren’t novices either.  Most of the time an intact deer is fairly manageable, or at least manageable enough to load into a truck and discard like the reeking corpse that it is.  But we had never dealt with a specimen that looked as though it had been hit by a tank, run over by a motorcycle gang, and then bombed from the sky.  It proved to be more difficult than anticipated.

John wanted to avoid the backdoor mix-up that was starting to drip down the hind legs, so he took the front two legs by the head, and I grabbed the back two.  Immediately, a stiff wind of death swept past us, but being the footsoldiers of county decency, we pressed forward.  The first attempt to lift her into the bed was a failure, and we sat her down to collect our thoughts for a moment.  The back end was starting to dismantle, and my face was beginning to twist with disgust at the purplish trail of intestines that were winding into the road.  I wanted it all to be done with.

We counted to three and lifted once more to swing the beast into the truck.  As we struggled to raise the head, we could hear the sound of tearing.  Being a lardass of 20 years running, I assumed it was the crotch of my jeans, and for the first time in my life, I was sorry that it wasn’t.  The back legs stretched to their limits, and without notice, snapped off, dropping my end to the asphalt.  The sudden jolt not only dismantled what fragile support there was for the bowel system, spilling the innards across the highway, (and my boots,) but apparently shocked the entire inner workings.  A shot of blood came out of the mouth and left a healthy slathering on the front of John’s shirt.  He squealed and dropped his end with frustration. 

So here we are: John and I standing in the middle of Highway 99 around a mutilated deer corpse.  He’s got blood dripping off his gloves and t-shirt, and I’m holding two legs in the air like drum sticks with yesterday’s berries oozed across my boots.  If I had been a passerby to a similar situation, I would have called local authorities. 

“That’s it!” John screamed, wiping his gloves on the grass.  “I’ll take care of this myself.”  He told me to watch down the road and tell me if anyone was coming.  Not a car in sight.  He grabbed the front two legs and shuffled himself backwards across the highway toward the opposite side ditch.  Pulling the carcass over the edge, he disappeared into the trench with a grunt.  I leaned up against the truck and couldn’t help but laugh, realizing how disastrous the whole process had gone.  Sensing a need to help, I collected all the scattered body parts on the road, leaving a tremendous pool of blood on the east side. With an arm full of parts, I chucked them into the ditch, hitting John with a sliver of belly meat and a renegade antler.  He was not amused.

Peeking over the edge, I tried to see what his plan was.  He had smashed the deer into the ground as well as he could, and was proceeding to cover it up with cornhusks and tall grass.  I almost spit up my lunch with laughter.  A car passed by and I gave him the head’s up.  He quickly put his hands behind his back as if there were no particular reason as to why he had descended into the ditch.  I doubled over with another heave of comedy.

Climbing out of the ditch, John and I stood next to each other and admired the work.  A great brown mound in the middle of a bright green patch of field ditch.  Lying to ourselves, we said it was completely inconspicuous and impossible to see from the road, wiping our hands of wrong doing and committing fully to the idea of practicality.  “There was no other way,” I said looking down at the hump.  “It had to be done.”

We drove off that afternoon with smiles across our faces, knowing that if our boss or the neighbors had seen our display, we probably would be explaining ourselves for the next few days.  We told ourselves that the dismembered limb teetering on the top of the pile could have come from anywhere.  And sadly, we were completely satisfied with our solution.

Driving by this morning, the heavy rain last night had moved most of the grass pile, leaving the sorrowful deer exposed to the elements and more tragic looking than ever.  We had one thing going for us: It looked as though only a rabid animal could have torn it apart like that.  It couldn’t possibly be the product of a couple college kids from the Midwest.  Never.

Silly teenage girl exclamation of the day: I love my job.

Dig Your Graves Now, Liberal Nation! We Are Swine That Cannot Be Harvested For Meat!

Do you remember all the left wing blowhards that came out after September 11^th and claimed it was all an intricate plot by the U.S. government to gain sympathy for a full-scale attack on the Middle East?  The hullabaloo over films like Loose Change and Zeitgeist?  Sometimes I’d like to forget.  Did you know there are people out there who think that Pearl Harbor was a similar situation, allowed to happen for the sake of solidifying support for U.S. involvement in World War II?   For years I’ve had liberal nutjobs breathing down my neck about everything from the JFK assassination to the idea that America actually caused the great Asian Tsunami a few years back.  Most would agree that these proposals are filled with holes and faulty logic, and I’ve never attached myself to anything of the sort.  But after a while, you have to rock the boat.

Speaking of conspiracy theorists, it was just last week that James Von Braun shot up the Holocaust Museum in D.C., voicing a significant stance of defiance against the well-documented tragedy of the Holocaust.  Von Braun is well into his late eighties, prompting lefty commentator Bill Maher to remark, “New Rule: You can’t call someone a neo-Nazi if they are older than the Nazi-Nazis.”  And indeed, it seems a bit more than strange to think that this elderly bigot was planning to target not only the Holocaust Museum, but a number of other Washington D.C. locations, as well as Fox News headquarters.  And to be honest, after years of scrutiny, I imagine Fox News would have been the most well prepared for the situation. 

But even more bizarre about his quest, including his apparent disgust for Roger Ailes’s Fox News, is the fact that Von Braun is about as far right as you can get on the political compass.  He blogged about his hate for civil rights and the equality of the races, and a number of other more mundane topics that would make my blog look like Disney World in print.   But the Nazis are a fundamentally right wing group, full of absurd claims that rival every bit of insanity that Socialism would dare to bring about.  Yes, it might seem far-fetched to some, but the Nazi ideology would be a threat to President Obama and his radical policies of uber-nationalization. 

Let’s look back further, to just around two weeks ago when abortion provider George Tiller was gunned down in front of his church.  The motive was very clear: pro-life advocates were fed up with the idea of the most extreme of Bible-based sins, late term abortions, and they were going to put a stop to it.  At this point, there are only a handful of professionals willing to perform the procedure, making it one of the most dangerous professions in the country.  Regardless of your beliefs about abortion or the like, most would agree that the actions carried out were beyond extreme, and dripping with irrationality.  Death on top of “death,” (the quotations placed in respect for my own beliefs on the topic,) brings a familiar quotation to mind: An eye for an eye and the whole world goes blind.

But to provide a more intimate and realistic quotation, straight from my facebook feed directly after the murder, “I’m sorry George Tiller, but you had it coming.”

To branch off into a tangent for just a moment, I want to say something directly from the heart, (a place that has been neglected in most of my writing, and one I promise to avoid for the rest of this piece.)  No one should ever protest a funeral.  In the name of your God, in the name of your country even, no one should ever physically protest a funeral.  Even surrounding the topic of murder or rape, my position remains the same.  A human being has died, for better or worse, and can we as a people not respect their dismissal from earth?  They are not here to witness your upset, nor is your protest seen as a shining beacon of truth.  Those who desecrate the grave sites of both saints and sinners deserve nothing less than shame themselves.  Mother Theresa nor Hitler should ever be lowered into the ground in front of a crowd seething with anger.  They have left this world.  Why would you dare to elongate the process?

Having realized the increasing length of this spiel, allow me to quickly cut to the chase: There was a shooter in New York just a couple months ago who picked off 13 victims in a matter of minutes.  The shooter killed himself, so his intentions were never fully realized, but several columnists and bloggers came out with a similar theory: the man was so upset by the idea that gay marriage had been legalized in Iowa that he went on self-destructive rampage of bigotry.  And to go even further, several suggested that the election of Barack Obama as President had triggered some kind of gun scare.  Basically, the election of a liberal president frightened gun owners, believing he would attempt to revoke their right to bare arms, and caused a frenzy of trigger-happy Constitutionalists.  To preserve their 2^nd Amendment Rights, people would be using their guns more often than ever – even to commit heinous acts.  Now what point these right-wing writers were trying to present had initially been lost in a dizzying fog, but I’m beginning to connect some comically conspiratorial dots.  It was all a warning.

Holocaust Museum Shooter: Neo-Nazi against Civil Rights, as well as belief in the Holocaust, (a liberal Jewish myth.)
Abortion Doctor Shooter: Far-right religious fanatic taking a vigilante stance against the sin of abortion.
New York Shooter Justification: Anti-gay marriage and protection of 2^nd Amendment principles. 

Is anyone else seeing a pattern of far-right hate? 

The Conspiracy Theory: The American far-right is planning an ultimatum – dispose of this liberal government or people are going to die. 

Is that crazy enough for you?  To suggest that a party that can’t even decide what positions they are for or against could be involved in the organization of a national conspiracy?  May I remind you that none of us have given Bush enough credit as a political mastermind.  But all the setup is there, if not structured at all by conventional party doctrine.  To begin the Republican Revolution would be very simple, and would most likely begin with a speech from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, (a slimy amphibian of a name for a slimy amphibian of a politician):

“My friends – we are all proud Americans.  Proud to serve our country in times of need and proud to protect our country in the wake of a threat to our freedoms.  And for far too long now, our nation has been under attack from the liberal agenda and the Socialist ideology that has plagued our recent misfortunes.  America has spoken out, in a sincere moment of revolution, and lives have been lost in response to the tyranny of a Democratic government.  Can we as a nation cast our political differences aside and embrace a simple truth: only one party can keep this country safe.  Only one party can protect our people with certainty and unrivaled power.  This is the time for a Republican movement – a movement created for the safety of our citizens – to end this uprising of violence.  It is plain to see that a Democratic government promotes nothing but unfortunate death, and in order for these tragedies to stop, we must bring back our Republican house.  We must bring back our Republican Senate.  And we must bring back a God-fearing President, a conservative of moral fiber, who will lead us back into the shining light of God, and away from the disgusting reign of liberal insanity that will forever be seen as an oil slick in the annals of time.  God bless America, and God bless our troops.”

Because in order for any speech to be credible, you have to bless the troops – God forbid you not do so, you are a commie, a killer, a swine.  And the chants of “Heil Gingrich” will be heard across the land, and Sarah Palin will rise again as the charismatic leader of the Republican nation, accompanied by any number of well-dressed zombies, from Eric Cantor to Bobby Jindal.  Mitt Romney’s a Mormon, such an unfortunate thing to be in the middle of a Christian theocracy, and will immediately be trampled in the great Revolution Riots of 2012, perhaps by Mike Huckabee himself, who very well might become the next chief of this great land, under the close and personal guidance of Jesus Christ.  Yes, I can see it all now. 

And the liberals will be herded up like cattle and sent to the Gulags of Colorado and Montana.  They must be exterminated to prevent further travesties!  The ghost of Hubert Humphrey will try and comfort the weary prisoners, but it is no use, because the liberal species has always been a spineless one, and Humphrey’s hulking frame casts nothing but a dismal shadow on the entire lot.  The only benefit to being spineless is that the opposition realizes you are no good for physical labor, so you will be put out of your misery immediately.  A whole colony of starving Socialist dogs. 

Have I made it far-fetched enough?

Obviously, the idea of a neo-con takeover shouldn’t scare any one quite yet, but as usual, my actual point is hidden somewhere in a mess of sarcasm and self-important rhetoric.  There IS a rush of conservative violence, and there IS a need to bring this idea to the forefront before it gets out of hand.  It truly isn’t a partisan issue, but rather a humanitarian one, and perhaps even a practical suggestion.  Violence in this arena is not justified, especially considering the usual presentation of a tolerant God.  People cannot take things into their own hands for the “sake of humanity.”  The same goes for the liberal eco-terrorists, destroying people’s livelihoods for the salvation of the environment.  The side is not important.  As my government teacher Mr. Remmers once perfectly commented, Al Queda are extremists of Islam – a religion that has been vilified in recent years by the Western world.  The Ku Klux Klan are religious extremists as well – of Christianity. 

One more little (ha) article about tolerance.  One more reaching grasp for a better world, or at least a better circle of readership.  And if last week’s stinging comment means anything, (“Dear Alex Denison.  You are a faggot,”) it promises that I won’t be shutting up any time soon.  Just one more thing Joe Biden and I share, (besides a loving relationship) – we can never manage to keep our mouths shut.

Alex Denison, Ph.D.

Des Moines County, Iowa

“Ch-ch-check this fucker out,” Martin the county sign worker said to me, sliding his greasy fingers across a hand-held roller ball mouse.  He squinted at a tiny computer screen in the middle of the cab, and I leaned over to take a closer look.  It was a satellite map of Des Moines County, from Burlington to Yarmouth, and every dusty dirt road in between.  “Find your huh-house,” Martin spit out with a smile, handing me the mouse and leaning back in his shock resistant chair.  And I did. 
           

I zoomed all the way in, close enough to see the tear in the passenger side fabric of my Jeep’s old soft top, suggesting that the photos were taken sometime recently.  I was admittedly impressed, and Martin could see it on my face, so he told me to “dick around” with it some more as we made our way down the back roads of the county.  I pretended to, but I didn’t know what I was looking for.  I just kept zooming in on silos and crop patterns that looked like UFO creations until eventually I stopped and started gazing out the window.  The green hills seemed to go on forever, but I knew that they did not.  I’ve always known that they did not.  Martin told me he had only left Iowa once, last summer for California, and I wonder if he ever thought they just went on forever, never ending, like a perpetual galaxy of crops.  I’m sure he, like myself, sometimes wishes they did.  I’ve always wished they did.
           

And in between the staggered stutters of Martin’s explanations, (an unfortunate thing to witness, although he keeps such a good humor about it,) I lolled in and out of conscious thought.  I saw the upturned silos from last summer’s gruesome flood, and they reminded me of beautifully tragic works of art.  The leaning silo of Yarmouth, I thought, but didn’t dare share it with Martin.  He was in the middle of a lengthy tirade over affirmative action that I had accidentally provoked, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to explain why I thought these shattered dreams were gorgeous.  It just wouldn’t make sense, and doesn’t make sense, in any and all forms.  Once after creating a lopsided barricade, I tried to tell him about “wabi-sabi,” the Japanese belief in beauty through the imperfect.  He told me to stop spouting off that Swahili shit.  And I did. 
           
I think back about that satellite imagery from Martin’s sign truck and all the things that fill up just our tiny nook of the world.  There are 99 counties in Iowa alone, well over 3,000 in the rest of the country, and God forbid I sit down and do the research through the world’s commonwealths and territories, boroughs or “parishes”.  That’s what Louisiana calls them, parishes, which I learned from an old black and white movie whose name escapes me as I babble.  Too many nights watching those old films. But focusing back on just our little patch of earth, it’s hard to fathom all the life stories that are being played out day by day, as I type, and as you sleep, and as we all pass each other through routine.  40,600 people, give or take a few well-fed farmers who die from high cholesterol, or a handful of drunk teenagers that navigated their way through a few bottles of Smirnoff and then end over end into a ditch.  And then a couple babies are popped out from time to time, little “Jacobs” or “Catherines” and a few cutesy names like “Willow” that will never make it in the real world with such a whimsical signature.  And what a shame.

CEO’s are not named Willow, Toby, or Hope.  Believe what you want to believe, from the creation of the universe to the meaning of life, but CEO’s are not named Willow, Toby, or Hope.

And just from our little cranny of the globe, a place that seems so boring and non-complex, we all know people that would put big city stories to shame.  Cheating husbands living in basements with barely legal girls, drunken public officials found in fast-food parking lots, and a number of shameless deviants whose names tend to slip our minds, so conveniently, just as we want to tell their tale to an outsider, a foreigner to this former boomtown, this well dug hole.  Someone is cheating on their partner at this moment.  Hell, maybe two or three.  Some high school kid is taking a swig of lightning in a barn down a worn out road.  And someone else, a lot of people, are plotting their way out.  There’s a number of options, really.  Some will choose finality. 

I drove through the Burger King drive-thru this evening and saw an old friend of mine in the rear view mirror.  I say friend out of pure folksy hospitality, when in reality, we merely shared space a time or two, and shot the breeze a few times more.  He was in a neck brace, sporting his trademark aviators, and his wife was slouched against the passenger side mirror.  He used to tell some of the craziest stories; his wife giving birth to a three foot tall man, or how he knifed his way out of a hospital room in the ‘80s.  Us kids never took him too seriously, but I think he believed what he was saying.  And for all I know, it may be true.  I’m sure every county in Iowa has a “Greasy Steve,” or a “Vince” that becomes the stuff of legend – pure mythology at times – but yet we think of them as our own.  Only our own.  And yet their stories rarely leave the boundaries of our chunk.

Sometimes I lie outside at night and just think about all the people I have met over the past few years.  Faces I’d like to greet, but realize quickly they don’t remember me at all.  Faces I’d like to meet, but realize quickly I’ll never see them again.  Some of those are the most haunting of all.  And at times it almost feels as though the moon is mocking our little county, coming round when it likes and leaving without so much as a goodbye, creating the sultry black sky I’ve driven under for many years now, with friends and strangers alike.  I think about what Martin does after work, and whether he really does try and pork his wife at the dinner table after every meal, or whether I’d just really like to believe that.  I tell myself I don’t, but for some reason it seems charming. 

And I think about all of us trying so hard to get out – future doctors and lawyers, writers and engineers – all with the simple goal of leaving this town, this county behind.  I, of course, am one of them.  It could be that mocking moon, but I strive to just get out, get free, and look around somewhere else for a while.  And I used to think we all felt that way, that deep longing to get out at whatever cost, but I’ve learned more over the past couple weeks than just how to disintegrate a deer.  Some people really love it here, and wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.  “We were like the Beverly Hillbillies,” Martin told me of his trip to California.  “It’s just too different for me.”  And in Martin’s case, I can’t blame him.  Corn-fed, corn-bred, and proud to say so – as though he shouldn’t be.  I’ve lost a bit of smarm and gained a bit of respect for those with simple ambitions.  Pure ambitions – to live, to love, and to just get by, without the flash of higher ideals.  I honestly can’t blame them, and at times I envy the thought.  What are we truly living for: the pursuit of happiness or the pursuit of power, wealth, and greed?  It’s a larger topic than suitable for this county, which is why we’ll leave it alone.

So why do I want out?  I’ve got a lot between my ears that doesn’t sit well in this place.  I’ve lost a lot of my angst, and I’ve started leaning toward practicality.  My dreams just don’t fit inside this box.  Hell, it might just be a needed change of scenery. And yes, industry is down, and sometimes it seems the entire economic morale may sink into the depths of the muddy Mississippi, but there’s always something to be done.  If you like it here, don’t be ashamed.  You’re in good company, I’ve seen.  And most situations, like riverboat paddles, work in steady cycles.

Yes, Des Moines Country is truly a beautiful place if you’re looking for the right things.  A bit simple for some, but isn’t it always?  The 3^rd biggest harvest, next to corn or soy, is nearly always complaint.  But maybe you have a head full of notions that can’t be reached from these old roads.  A head full of notions that have been screaming for too long, and you’re afraid they’ll echo through the valleys.  I understand, I do.  I’m with you.

Or maybe the moon’s mocking you, too.